There are so many food festivals, you could spend every weekend of the year at a different one. Newspapers and magazines (including this one) often recommend the best and there’s at least one website that lists them all – currently 338. That’s almost one for every day of the year. There are festivals for sausages, oysters and, in Suffolk where I live, even for peas.
We flock to these foodie jamborees in our thousands. They’re a chance to enjoy a civilised festival experience for those who don’t like camping and smelly loos. On the face of it, that’s a good thing: we should know more about what food is produced in our countryside and who produces it.
But all too often these events are packed, not with food that inspires us to buy some, then go home and cook with it, but with stall after stall of identical jams and over-the-top cupcakes. Most of the festival-goers eating their bodyweight in samples (with no intention of parting with any cash) are not there to buy any meat and veg – they want to be entertained. After all, they can shop at a supermarket on the way home. Meanwhile the same group of hungover chefs, touted out by their publishers to flog their latest book, is marched bleary-eyed onto the stage only to burn the onions because, after a night of boozing, it’s as much as they can do to string a sentence together, let alone cook at the same time.
“We need to stop seeing food as entertainment”